The Department of Anthropology’s annual undergraduate research symposium and showcase takes place on March 28th from 6:30 P.M. to 8:30 P.M. in room 103 in Erickson Hall. Parents are welcome, too!
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Featured Faculty, Dr. Masako Fujita: A passion for anthropology and making a difference in women’s health and wellness
Dr. Masako Fujita Dr. Masako Fujita is an Associate Professor in biological anthropology, specializing in contemporary human variation. She also directs the Biomarker Laboratory for Anthropological Research. She regularly teaches the graduate course Quantitative Methods in Anthropology and undergraduate courses such as Introduction to Physical Anthropology and Human Adaptability.
Dr. Fujita joined MSU as an Assistant Professor in 2008. She remembers that period of time as “a little hectic” because when she moved to East Lansing to join MSU Anthropology, she had submitted her final dissertation copy only about ten days prior. Even though the abrupt transition to becoming a professor was challenging, things got better over time. “I have been fortunate to work with friendly office staff, graduate assistants, and colleagues,” she says.
In terms of research, Dr. Fujita is interested in women’s health and wellness, particularly women in vulnerable life stages like pregnancy and lactation. Her research thus far has focused on maternal nutrition and health, breastfeeding, and mothers’ milk. Her Master’s research focused on the impact of sedentarization on maternal diet, nutrition, and morbidity among formerly nomadic pastoralists in northern Kenya. For her PhD dissertation, she continued with people of northern Kenya and investigated how mothers cope with food insecurity amid repeated and increasingly severe droughts.
More recently, Dr. Fujita’s research has focused more on mothers’ milk, investigating the notion of maternal buffering – “there is this assumption that mothers can maintain high-quality milk to nourish infants even under nutritional or infectious disease stress. But in some harsh environments, I feel that it is unrealistic to expect mothers to pull this off. So, I have been trying to address this question in my research, working with my collaborators”.
Her research team recently published two journal articles; one on the micronutrient folate in mothers’ milk and the other on the antimicrobial protein called lactoferrin in mothers’ milk. Both these papers deal with the question of maternal buffering.
Dr. Fujita is excited about the current research she is involved in with her collaborators investigating iron nutrition and COVID-19 risk among healthcare workers. Iron is a vital nutrient for both humans and microorganisms. This means that humans have walked a fine line between too much iron (which can fuel infections) and too little iron (which can compromise health) through evolutionary history. Dr. Fujita and colleagues are testing the optimal iron hypothesis, predicting that having somewhat low iron in the blood will be protective against infections, including COVID-19. The research team has collected data among healthcare workers in Nigeria, and they are about to begin data analysis. She looks forward to disseminating the results from this research.
Dr. Fujita always had a passion for anthropology. She initially took an introduction to anthropology course as an elective in British Columbia and learned some fundamental concepts such as holism and ethnocentrism. She says, “I was an international student, and anthropology helped me adapt to the life in the host country. Born and raised in a more homogeneous country, it was my first time to live among people with different cultural backgrounds. Anthropology helped me navigate life.” When asked to share a piece of advice for her students, Dr. Fujita mentioned important advice she received from her loving mother: “Enjoy the process – my mother said that at her age nearing the end of life, what she has come to treasure the most is the process – being in the midst of it – rather than her achievements. Looking back at my own years as a student, I too treasure the journey part – it was lengthy and at times unsure if I would ever finish, but in hindsight those were invaluable years!”
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Anthropology Grad Student Spotlight: Kelsey Merreck Wagner – Human-environment relationships and art as activism
By Katie Nicpon
Passionate about the intersection of people, animals, environment and activism, Kelsey Merreck Wagner is a Ph.D. candidate in the MSU Anthropology program and is also an artist. Since the pandemic, she has been weaving community trash into tapestries and preparing for her dissertation research trip to Thailand in October.
MSU Anthropology PhD candidate and local artist Kelsey Merreck Wagner stands with her tapestry she wove using plastic. For more of her art, visit her website. Photo credit: Kelsey Merreck Wagner.
“I was really drawn to the idea that weavings are inherently based in place because people generally use local fibers, whether it’s from sheep or local plant fibers, and the dyes from their materials come from their local ecosystems,” she said. “I really kind of wanted to do a satirical nod to that by thinking: Okay, what is my place-based weaving as a white woman in America? Plastic. Plastic. Plastic is my local resource that I have so much of. Trash is part of our environment and so plastic really can’t be separated from that. Because once it’s made, once it’s consumed and thrown away, it’s always going to be there. I started weaving with these as an experiment and realized I really loved the textures and patterns.”
Once she began collecting trash from others, she realized how trash displays intersectional identities in a person or a community such as gender, age, race and class, almost like a portrait.
“I also see my art as a call out to these different brands and corporations as kind of an eye opener of how much plastic adds up over time,” she said.
Her work will be showcased in the upcoming MSU Museum Science Gallery 1.5 ° Celsius exhibition which begins on September 6, 2022, and will last through February 2023. The exhibition will include contributions of more than one dozen national and international artists, scientists, and researchers to help the public explore the global climate crisis.
“They also asked me to do a weaving workshop at the STEM building,” Wagner said. “I’m going to be bringing a huge, basic, wooden tapestry loom that I’ll build for this one project. I’ll be bringing in plastic and then workshop participants are also encouraged to bring in any kind of trash that they want to weave with. We’re going to all work together to do a collaborative community weaving and see what we can make. We will be able to think of it as a portrait of the community or of the participants thinking about all the different trash that we use.”
Wagner will lead a weaving workshop on September 18 at the MSU Museum open to everyone in the community. Register at museum.msu.edu. Photo credit: MSU Museum.
Wagner’s undergrad training is in studio art and art history, and she found an interdisciplinary masters’ anthropology program where she was able to develop her art in relation to sustainability and the environment.
“I was passionate about and wanted to get more involved with environmentalism, but I never saw myself as a natural scientist,” she said. “But during my master’s, I started going to work at this elephant organization in Thailand, and it made me realize for the first time that conservation is really about people, and it’s about communities.”
Once she graduated from her master’s program, she worked for a year in Cambodia for an environmental organization as their exhibitions coordinator for their natural history museum. She was applying to MSU at the time and getting in touch with Dr. Beth Drexler, who is now her current graduate advisor.
“She was excited about the idea of blending visual anthropology and interdisciplinary research, and environmental activism, which is so exciting, because it was important to me to find an advisor and a program that values interdisciplinary work and activism,” she said. “That’s really why I ended up at MSU in this program, because I felt like there’s so many people that were studying different things and blending different bodies of knowledge, especially in a four field program. And that felt like the right fit for me. It all fell into place that I would be able to use my background in arts, my love of elephants and the environment. And then just also being really interested in how people relate to environments.”
Wagner is in her fourth year of her MSU Anthropology PhD program. In October, she will travel to Thailand to start her dissertation research. Her work focuses on human-environment and human-animal relationships, and how people have long-standing traditions of interacting with the environment, interacting with animals in the ecosystems in ways that are part of their culture. In Thailand, she is specifically interested in researching human-elephant relationships.
“I have been obsessed with elephants since I was a little girl, so it’s been a life-long passion of mine,” Wagner smiled. “In Thailand, elephants are so common in material culture and pop culture. They’re the national cultural symbol, and everywhere you go, there are sculptures of elephants outside buildings, in restaurants, t-shirts, and tourism goods – you see elephants everywhere. I’m also an artist, so I like seeing how elephants are portrayed and what a particular culture or community within that culture thinks about these animals and how they treat them.”
There’s a conservation component of her research where she’ll be continuing to work with the elephant organization Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai that she’s been working with since her master’s.
“It’s a giant elephant sanctuary where they have over 100 rescued elephants that have been rescued from circuses, street begging, logging – many unethical, unfair labor situations. The sanctuary is run by a local Thai woman who only hires local Thai and nearby ethnic groups to work at this organization caring for the elephants. Then, tourists come in and pay to clean up after the elephants and feed them. It’s a huge organization that does a lot for local communities, including funding and building some local schools.”
Wagner working with Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where she will complete her dissertation research. Photo credit: Kelsey Merreck Wagner
Through the organization, Wagner hopes to do a community engagement art project with the youth. While she envisions giant murals or a large art installation, she’s also leaving it open-ended because she wants the youth to express their ideas for the project.
“I’m trying to really just make those connections between activism and expression, both personal expression and community expression by bringing in the idea of talking about the environment through art. Anthropologists are really interested in applied and activist anthropology, and pondering how our research can contribute to issues as broad as climate change and human rights. And so for me, that’s why it’s really important to be working on these different art projects and activism projects with community members, and especially youth, because I see it as my way to be able to like give back in this very specific art and activism skill set that I’ve been developing for more than 10 years now.”
View Wagner’s work and join in the discussion about climate change at the MSU Museum Science Gallery 1.5 ° Celsius exhibition: https://museum.msu.edu/?exhibition=1-5-celsius. The weaving workshop is on the MSU campus from 1:00-2:00 on Sunday, September 18. You can register here.
To learn more about the MSU Department of Anthropology, visit anthropology.msu.edu.
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Featured Faculty, Dr. Mindy Morgan
Dr. Mindy Morgan is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and affiliated faculty member of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies program, as well as the Graduate Program Director for the Department of Anthropology. Dr. Morgan specializes in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology.
Dr. Ruth Underhill, center (image provided by the Denver Museum of Nature & Science) Over the course of the past few years, Dr. Morgan has been exploring the history of anthropology and engaging in new conversations regarding our disciplinary past. This work grew from her larger investigation into the periodical Indians at Work, which was published by the Office of Indian Affairs in the 1930s and contained articles authored by bureaucrats, tribal members, and anthropologists. Dr. Ruth M. Underhill, an anthropologist trained by Franz Boas at Columbia University, was one of these contributors. Dr. Morgan first wrote about Underhill’s contributions to anthropological debates at the time in her 2017 article Anthropologists in Unexpected Places: Tracing Anthropological Theory, Practice, and Policy in Indians at Work, which was published in the American Anthropologist. During this time, Dr. Morgan also helped coordinate a roundtable for the American Anthropological Association meetings in Minneapolis that allowed her to think more deeply about the ways in which Underhill participated in both the production and circulation of disciplinary knowledge in the early 20th century.
Dr. Morgan’s recent 2019 article, “Look Once More at the Old Things”: Ruth Underhill’s O’odham Text Collections which appears in Histories of Anthropology Annual, vol. 13, grew out of the paper for the roundtable. In the article, she looks at the ways in which Underhill’s collection of O’odham songs and texts in the early 20th century was taken up by others decades later, and reinterpreted according to the needs of the contemporary community. Many of the songs collected by Underhill for her seminal work Singing for Power were retranslated and republished in the 1970s by O’odham community members, Baptisto Lopez, José Pancho, and David Lopez working in collaboration with the anthropologist, Donald Bahr. Their work, Rainhouse and Ocean: Speeches for the Papago Year, does not just reproduce Underhill’s text but extends them by offering new insights and analyses of the songs. A later edition of Singing for Power was issued that carried an introduction by Ofelia Zepeda, an O’odham linguist and scholar working within the language revitalization movement of the early 1990s. Dr. Morgan looks at how these various entextualizations not only bring new meanings, but new opportunities for transmission and circulation. A central argument in the article is that Underhill’s manner of both collecting and representing the song texts was prescient and indicated her own belief that these texts would and should continue to circulate among the O’odham community for generations to come.
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Featured Faculty, Dr. Gabriel Wrobel
Associate Professor Gabriel Wrobel’s interest in the bioarchaeology of ancient Maya began as an undergraduate student during a fieldschool in Belize. After working at one of the rockshelter sites for a day, he felt a profound connection to the area and its stunning landscape. He decided in that moment that he would pursue a PhD and run his own fieldschool there. Twelve years later, Dr. Wrobel took his first group of students to continue work at that same site. Once Dr. Wrobel began working there, he expanded his research to include a variety of new sites, including caves, rockshelters, and buildings.
Since 2005, Dr. Wrobel has directed a field project in central Belize, which includes an Education Abroad fieldschool program providing undergraduate students hands-on research training. Dr. Wrobel, his graduate and undergraduate students, and the project’s staff have worked mostly in caves and rockshelters but have also carried out excavations of buildings at a few urban centers in their research area. The cave and rockshelter sites were used for a variety of ritual activities, including burial. The research team’s analyses of the artifacts and skeletons recovered from these sites focus on reconstructing the elaborate and diverse ritual practices, and on identifying aspects of the lives and deaths of individuals who lived in the surrounding area 1000–2300 years ago.
With the aim to build a local culture history of central Belize, Dr. Wrobel and his students study evidence of people’s lives and deaths that are preserved in their bones. This includes reconstructing diet from isotopes in their bones and teeth, finding evidence of disease, recording patterns of intentional cranial modification and tooth filing, and documenting diversity of mortuary treatment. From these data they determine how variations in biology and culture changed over time and interpret these patterns by considering the social, ecological, political, and economic contexts that shaped people’s lives.
Dr. Wrobel and his team’s work has built significantly on previous research in the region. For example, excavations of several rockshelter sites have provided evidence for the presence of Archaic hunter-gatherers in the region several thousand years ago, and the establishment of small farming villages by 300 BC. They have also reported the region’s largest urban center—a site they named Tipan Chen Uitz (Fortress Well Mountain)—where they found several large carved monuments with writing. Dr. Wrobel and his team’s work at Tipan and other large civic-ceremonial centers in the area have demonstrated a sudden growth of population size and social complexity beginning in the 6th century AD. Furthermore, they can see evidence of economic and political ties with other areas of the Maya world. Dr. Wrobel and his team’s work in the deep caves has documented extensive evidence for the mortuary use of these contexts, providing important information about social and political changes to the region’s population during the height of Classic Maya civilization.
From the perspective of Maya history, Dr. Wrobel and his team have been able to fill in a large gap that was central Belize. Their research has provided valuable information about the region’s development over time, and the role that external political forces had in shaping that development. From a more general anthropological perspective, they use the data from central Belize to help answer broader biocultural questions about humans and human society. Dr. Wrobel and his team’s work particularly demonstrates how local communities are able to adapt and change in response to environmental limitations and to new political pressures.
Dr. Wrobel and his research team have published their research from central Belize in numerous articles in journals and edited volumes, as well as in several dissertations and theses by graduate students. Additionally, every year following fieldwork, technical reports describing their research and results are given to the Belize government’s archaeology office and made available to the public through their Central Belize Archaeological Survey (CBAS) Project website.
The CBAS field project is on a temporary hiatus, but they continue to analyze their excavated materials and publish their findings. Next year, Dr. Wrobel hopes to return to the field and will start a new project excavating at an ancient coastal Maya trading site on an island off the coast of northern Belize.
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Featured Faculty, Dr. Kurt Rademaker
Dr. Kurt Rademaker Dr. Kurt Rademaker started with MSU Anthropology in Fall of 2018. His research focuses on human biogeographic expansion into the Andes mountains and adds to our understanding of the timing and routes of initial human settlement of the Americas and the role of ecological variability in driving human adaptations and in understanding the relationships between humans and their environments. Learning about the human past is essential for understanding the history and evolution of the environments we inhabit.
Dr. Rademaker’s current projects include excavations of archaeological sites from the Pacific Coast to the high Andes, as well as surveys in remote, unexplored areas to discover new sites. Archaeological sites indicate that people were connected over large areas, his research seeks to understand when and how those connections formed, how they functioned and were sustained over time. His work collaborates with physical anthropologists, paleogeneticists and earth scientists to study what past environments were like and how these have changed over time. It is thrilling to think about the first groups of people moving into new and uninhabited continents.
Kurt’s team has discovered that ice age environments in the Andes were not as hostile as people used to think and that early Americans could settle these high mountain environments at the end of the last ice age. His work has been featured in popular media outlets such as National Geographic, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Smithsonian, Sapiens, and many others. He feels it is important to share these discoveries with the global public. His work examines long-term Andean environmental change and its impact on past humans. He hopes what he learns will prove useful for current and future Andean people as they cope with climatic change.
Rademaker’s Team at Cuncaicha Rockshelter Currently, Dr. Rademaker is expanding beyond southern Peru to build transects of archaeological sites and paleoenvironmental records along the Andes. This work will allow them to explore variability in environmental change and human adaptive patterns. He is excited to be a part of a strong Anthropology department with excellent, supportive faculty and a vibrant community of graduate and undergraduate students. One of his favorite things about his work is that every day has the potential of discovering something new that no one has ever learned before. This is true both in the field and the lab.
Dr. Rademaker became interested in anthropology when he took an intro class as an undergraduate student at the University of Kentucky. By the time he took his second class, Introduction to Archaeology, he was hooked. That initial interest just deepened with time, after a field school and working in cultural resource management, leading him to pursue his PhD from the University of Maine in 2012. Outside of his work, Kurt loves exploring the outdoors with his wife Erica and their dog Cowboy and are glad to live in a state with lots of nature and opportunities for canoeing, hiking, camping. In the Andes and elsewhere he loves climbing high mountains and some of his other hobbies include motorcycles and gardening.
Kurt has two new publications in preparation on the site formation of Cuncaicha rockshelter and the digital cranial reconstruction of a 9000-year-old Andean highlander referred to as the Lady of Cuncaicha. We welcome Dr. Rademaker and look forward to more exciting research. For more information about his work, check out his working group’s website: www.paleoandes.com
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Featured Faculty: Dr. Joe Hefner
Dr. Joe Hefner joined the Department of Anthropology in the Fall semester of 2014 as an assistant professor in forensic anthropology. He currently teaches graduate level Human Osteology and Multivariate Statistical Analysis along with undergraduate Introduction to Physical Anthropology, Hominid Fossils and Time, Space and Change. Previously, Dr. Hefner worked as a contract archaeologist throughout the Southeastern United States and then at Mercyhurst College after completing his PhD in 2007 from the University of Florida.Joe reports stumbling into anthropology inadvertently during his undergraduate studies at Western Carolina University. As a philosophy/art/psychology major, he took an Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course and became hooked, deciding to change his major and declare social/cultural anthropology. Eventually, he found himself enrolled in archaeological field school and the rest is history as they say. From that moment on, Joe knew he wanted to do something with archaeology for the rest of his life. A few years after this, he discovered forensic anthropology and headed to Florida. As a graduate student, the young Dr. Hefner struggled to understand how forensic anthropologists were estimating ancestry. Prior to his latest research, estimating ancestry was an experience-driven, subjective approach that did not sit well with him. First, Joe felt he was not patient enough to become an expert and second, he believes that subjectivity should have no place in the field of forensic anthropology.
Dr. Hefner’s work investigates cranial morphology (cranial macromorphoscopic traits) as an indicator of geographic origin (i.e., ancestry in forensic anthropology). He examines modern individuals housed in skeletal collections around the world, collecting data on slight variations in the skull to estimate where these individuals originate from geographically. Because of the nature of estimation and classification in forensic anthropology, Dr. Hefner also works with statistical modeling. Traditionally that has included standard methods like discriminant function analysis, but computing power today has expanded new research horizons. Machine learning models are very popular now and, since he works with categorical data, many of those methods are more appropriate than traditional models that require a normal distribution.
Joe’s favorite part of his research is his love for data analysis and coming up with novel approaches to old questions. These reasons are why he is constantly trying to develop better analytical methods for classification analysis. Forensic anthropologists have been using many of the same methods since the fields inception. While these methods have been tested and hold true, Dr. Hefner wants to break out of those familiar paradigms. This means reading a lot of the literature from numerical ecology and machine learning.
Dr. Hefner enjoys the department and his colleagues. Dr. Hefner also enjoys the relationships he’s established with his graduate students, which allow them to work well together and “crank out” solid research. Joe hopes that the approaches he has developed have some staying power within the field and that someday, a young, new scholar will approach him at a conference and make it their goal “to spend their entire career trying to prove me wrong.”Aside from being a prolific publishing scholar and professor, Joe Hefner is also an avid reader and enjoys playing chess whenever he can, generally while also enjoying a nice small-batch bourbon. He has a new book coming out in August of 2018 entitled Atlas of Human Cranial Macromorphoscopic Traits from Elsevier, Academic Press. His newest publication, “The Macromorphoscopic Databank” should be out soon in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Dr. Hefner is collaborating on a variety of projects with colleagues the world over and working on tenure.
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Featured Faculty: Dr. Stacey Camp
The Department of Anthropology is pleased to introduce our new Associate Professor in archaeology and Campus Archaeology Program (CAP) Director, Dr. Stacey Camp. Dr. Camp’s research centers around an interest in how social inequality is manifested and expressed through material culture and the built environment. More specifically, she employs critical race theory to understand how marginalized groups respond to social isolation and discrimination through their consumption patterns. In her first book, The Archaeology of Citizenship, she examined how different marginalized groups, especially migrants, in the United States made claims to nationality and citizenship via material culture. Through this work, she hopes to diversify the stories we tell about the Western U.S., and bring to light elements of its neglected or forgotten past.In Idaho, Dr. Camp directed a public archaeological repository, where she began to admire CAP’s creative and unique approach to public outreach. Projects such as CAP’s “MSU dinner”, performed in partnership with Campus Culinary Services and MSU Bakers as well as CAP’s partnership with the MSU Paranormal Society to offer historic haunted tours are just some of distinctive styles of public engagement she admired from afar. Dr. Camp appreciates how CAP facilitates interdisciplinary collaborations between archaeologists and the campus community at large while also demonstrating the continued relevance of archaeology to the modern world. In her opinion, one of the most important features about the Campus Archaeology program is that it gives students who can’t attend field schools outside of the state or abroad an opportunity to gain vital archaeological field school experience at a minimal cost and provides students a very unique opportunity to connect with the history literally underneath their feet.
Her love for historical archaeology began after attending a field school in Ireland as an undergraduate with Dr. Charles Orser, Jr. of Illinois State University. Orser emphasized doing archaeology for the public good, which is what attracted her to historical archaeology. Camp ended up returning to Ireland to study the representation of the past and archaeological data at government-run museums and heritage sites in 2001, allowing her passions for ethnography, cultural anthropology, and archaeology to merge.
Growing up in Southern California, Dr. Camp loved studying geology and identifying rocks, an interest that eventually morphed into a love of artifacts and history. Having the opportunity to volunteer at a museum in high school made her decision to pursue Anthropology an easy one. When she’s not at work, she loves hiking, reading and reviewing fiction, and spending time with her two children, husband, and their dog. Before MSU, Dr. Camp was at a small land grant institution in rural Idaho for 9 years so there has been a bit of a welcome adjustment being back around an urban center. She and her family are excited to be at a university with so many resources and events taking place and to be near water and ice rinks again.
Dr. Camp says that the best part of her job is she gets paid to continually learn new information as well as to adapt to the changing needs of students in the classroom. She has taught thirteen different courses over the last 10 years as a professor, and learned much about human behavior, the past, and different cultures through her various course preps. She enjoys the challenge of learning and integrating new technologies and pedagogies into her classes to keep content fresh and relevant to today’s students.
Dr. Camp excavating at Kooskia Internment Camp Dr. Stacey Camp’s current research project involves archaeological and archival research on a World War II internment camp in Idaho, the Kooskia Internment Camp, where first generation Japanese migrants were imprisoned as enemy aliens by the United States government. This project uses material culture to examine how these Japanese migrants coped with incarceration. After two field seasons at the Kooskia Internment Camp, she is working on cataloging and analyzing her data, and has hopes to finish the cataloging process this year, which will allow her to publish her findings. The raw (and published) data can be found on www.internmentarchaeology.org.
Currently, she is writing an article on race and public health in World War II internment camps and has a commentary on an edited volume of the journal Historical Archaeology concerning World War II internment coming out next year. Also coming out in the next year is a book chapter on databases in historical archaeology.
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Featured Faculty: Dr. Beth Drexler
Dr. Beth Drexler has been very research active recently, thanks to an American Institute for Indonesian Studies Luce Fellowship (2014-2016) and a Fulbright (2015-2017). Her current project explores human rights and memories of violence in the aftermath of authoritarian rule in Indonesia and Timor-Leste (known as East Timor during its occupation by Indonesia). Her next book, tentatively titled “Human Rights, Transitional Justice and History in Indonesia,” analyzes the process of producing and circulating knowledge about past human rights violations in and through public culture, film, fiction, art, courtrooms, documents, and efforts to write new histories. She’s conducted archival research, interviews, and participant observation in relation to the past, and is also working with organizations to explore new issues in the democratic present.One focus of her current project addresses the commemorations and the materiality of history following the authoritarian Suharto era. Her dissertation research was conducted during a moment of national euphoria following the change in government, and substantial human rights legislation was passed at that time. Now nearly 20 years later, her research has a longitudinal aspect. In Indonesia there has been no formal, state-led process examining the authoritarian past. Instead, people have been working in more diverse ways throughout civil society to reconcile the country’s violent past and democratic present. For example, last year she observed events related to the 50th anniversary of mass killings of suspected members of the then legal communist party. She has interviewed victim support groups and student activists to understand their memory practices and how these reflect the present moment and people’s aspirations for the future. What do activists see as victories and milestones in human rights and the processes of memory? She is particularly interested in how ‘knowing’ plays a role in these practices, since the authoritarian era was a time of propaganda. What does truth recovery and the ‘end of lies’ look like for people and for their social relationships?
On an upcoming visit, she will work with colleagues at the University of Indonesia on a series of seminars related to human rights and ethnography, which will further her exploration of how Indonesian millennials view human rights norms. Although they were born after the Suharto years, millennials get drawn into justice and memory projects as they learn their country’s history. Young people are particularly savvy about online resources, and are collecting and curating their own collections of stories. In the process, they are participating in global human rights networks and producing history, using new media to tell stories differently and contribute to innovative archives of past voices.
Dr. Drexler’s research feeds into her teaching at MSU as she hopes to inspire her students to be engaged global citizens in classes such as Ethnographic Methods, Globalization and Justice, Human Rights, and Anthropological Approaches to Peace and Justice Studies. Undergraduates in her classes have kept “justice journals” in which they integrate theoretical readings with examples from their own lives that they deem important, such as song lyrics, bumper stickers, and graffiti. At some point she hopes to have her MSU students interact with her Indonesian students so they can share their methods of using social media to record and tell stories, map historical sites, and create their own narratives of history.
For Dr. Drexler, working with graduate students in MSU’s Department of Anthropology is one of the best parts of her job. She’s often taught the first year theory class (“Roots”) and has appreciated the opportunity to think more broadly about the discipline while sharing perspectives with the many bright students from various subdisciplines. She also enjoys teaching thematic graduate seminars on State Violence as well as Knowledge, Memory and Archives. Working with graduate students
she mentors on their own projects also helps her think comparatively about human rights and public anthropology. Directing Peace and Justice Studies at MSU has enabled her to work with undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, alumni and community members to create curricular and co-curricular opportunities for engaging shared thematic interests. The Department of Anthropology has also been very supportive of her research and interdisciplinary initiatives on campus, for which she is grateful.Click here to read the full newsletter.
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Dr. Anne Ferguson
Dr. Anne Ferguson will retire this year from her position as co-Director of the Center for Gender in Global Context (GenCen) and from the Department of Anthropology where she has been a professor since 1993. She leaves a remarkable legacy at MSU, including the creation of GenCen and the Gender Justice and Environmental Change (GJEC) graduate specialization.
Dr. Ferguson’s research and teaching have focused largely on land and water issues, tenure, governance, and social inequalities including gender. An interest in gender emerged in part from her personal experience. When she attended graduate school at MSU in the 1970s, she faced barriers that discriminated against women, such as being disqualified for in-state tuition because of her marital status and denied assistantships on the grounds that she ‘might get pregnant.’ After switching both her program and research focus—in part to accommodate these difficulties—she earned her Ph.D. in anthropology with a focus on Latin America.
While still in school, Dr. Ferguson took a position with DAI (Development Association Incorporated, a consulting firm in Washington, DC) as the gender specialist for a large maize project in what was then Zaire. After two years of this work, she returned to MSU to finish her PhD and accepted a job with the USAID-funded Bean/Cowpea Collaborative Research Support Program (CRSP) as their gender specialist. She spent 15 years with the project, carrying out research on legume production in Latin America and Africa and helping universities abroad integrate gender into their agricultural research programs.
Through CRSP she became involved in Southern and Eastern Africa, and eventually Malawi. Dr. Ferguson’s research continues to focus on Malawi 30 years later, where she works with the numerous colleagues and friends she has made there. “Besides my dissertation, I have never done a stand-alone project,” she says. “I have always had collaborators in all the countries where I worked.”
Although her tenure home is Anthropology, much of Dr. Ferguson’s work has involved programs elsewhere on campus. Following her work with CRSP, she became the fourth director of Women and International Development Program (WID), where she worked with Rob Glew (CASID) to jointly obtain a Title VI grant from the Department of Education. The grant is largely used to fund graduate students interested in gender and development learn the language pertinent to their research. While running WID, Dr. Ferguson created the GJEC specialization with Dr. Tracy Dobson (Fisheries and Wildlife). This unique program brings together graduate students from a variety of disciplines and equips them to incorporate gender into research on environmental issues.
In 2006, Dr. Ferguson worked with Dr. Lisa Fine (History) to create GenCen by combining the then-defunct women’s studies major and WID. GenCen continues to be one of the most innovative gender centers in the US because, unlike a traditional department, GenCen is housed within International Studies and Programs (ISP) and has over 200 affiliated faculty. This structure allows GenCen to engage both domestic and international issues while reaching across colleges and disciplines, constantly refreshing the curriculum with new faculty.
Through GenCen, Dr. Ferguson has been involved in integrating a gender dimension into multiple large grants within the colleges of Agriculture and Natural Resources and Social Science, helping to ensure that MSU’s activities promote equality. She has also been deeply involved in strategic partnership coordination, which includes over 40 faculty currently engaged in research in Malawi, the largest number of any US university. In recent years, Dr. Ferguson has also taken on a leadership role in ISP, first as Interim Associate Dean of Research and now as Interim Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Engagement.
Dr. Ferguson and Dr. Lisa Fine were also honored this spring at the Lavender Reception and Mosaic Awards as recipients of the 2016 Beverwyk Award (read more). The award acknowledges the GenCen directors for the creation of the LBGTQ+ Studies minor, which became available in 2015. Deanna Hurlbert, Director of the LBGT Resource Center, writes: “Lisa and Anne have been relentless advocates for sexuality and gender scholarship at Michigan State University and demonstrated brilliant administrative leadership as the architects of LGBTQ+ Studies. As of this school year, 68 students are working towards earning the LGBTQ+ Studies minor. In addition, the GenCen regularly offers 23 courses with significant LGBTQ content that are accessible to all students. Anne and Lisa have not just expanded the academic portfolio of this University, but have validated the humanity, the history, and the future of people marginalized by their sexuality or gender.”
Although much of Dr. Ferguson’s work has taken place outside of the Department, she has been very active on graduate student committees, serving 15-20 at any given time for most of her career. She considers training students to be one the most important aspect of her work, as students become the next generation of scholars. Her students have gone on to succeed in a variety of applied and university positions, and continue to stay in touch with her.
This article appears in our Spring 2016 newsletter. Read the entire newsletter here.
